I’ve
investigated Hillary and know she likes a ‘zone of privacy’ around her.
This lack of transparency, rather than any actual corruption, is her
greatest flaw

It’s impossible to miss the “Hillary for Prison” signs at Trump rallies. At one of the Democratic debates, the moderator asked Hillary Clinton
whether she would drop out of the race if she were indicted over her
private email server. “Oh for goodness – that is not going to happen,”
she said. “I’m not even going to answer that question.”Based
on what I know about the emails, the idea of her being indicted or
going to prison is nonsensical. Nonetheless, the belief that Clinton is
dishonest and untrustworthy is pervasive. A recent New York Times-CBS poll found that 40% of Democrats say she cannot be trusted.

For
decades she’s been portrayed as a Lady Macbeth involved in nefarious
plots, branded as “a congenital liar” and accused of covering up her
husband’s misconduct, from Arkansas to Monica Lewinsky. Some of this is
sexist caricature. Some is stoked by the “Hillary is a liar” videos that
flood Facebook feeds. Some of it she brings on herself by insisting on a
perimeter or “zone of privacy” that she protects too fiercely. It’s a
natural impulse, given the level of scrutiny she’s attracted, more than
any male politician I can think of.

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase,
if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every
“scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched
investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her
foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to
Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to
say next surprising.

The
yardsticks I use for measuring a politician’s honesty are pretty
simple. Ever since I was an investigative reporter covering the nexus of
money and politics, I’ve looked for connections between money
(including campaign donations, loans, Super Pac funds, speaking fees,
foundation ties) and official actions. I’m on the lookout for lies,
scrutinizing statements candidates make in the heat of an election.

The
connection between money and action is often fuzzy. Many investigative
articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about
“potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course,
she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to
use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those
hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of
where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

That’s the question the Supreme Court considered in Zubik v. Burwell when
it heard argument this week in the latest challenge to the Affordable
Care Act’s requirement that health insurance plans cover contraception
without a co-pay. The employers that have challenged the requirement
have a religious objection to providing contraception coverage for their
employees. But here’s the deal: The employers before the court don’t
actually have to provide the coverage if they fill out a one-page form
opting out. If the employer opts out, the insurance company provides the
contraception coverage to the employees in a separate plan, at no cost
to the employer.

But the employers object even to filling out the
opt-out form, and they object to what happens when they opt out — that
their insurer then provides the coverage to their employees. What would
happen if the Supreme Court accepts their argument? Tens of thousands
of employees would lose their contraception coverage.

The
contraception requirement was designed to reduce the disparities in
health care costs between men and women — women have historically paid
more for health care than men. Also, in establishing the contraception
requirement, the government recognized the basic principle that
contraception is crucial for women’s equal participation in society.
Being able to decide whether and when to have children has a direct
effect on women’s ability to make their own paths in terms of their
schooling, their careers, and their families.

The employers before
the court should not be allowed to use their religious beliefs to block
their female employees’ contraception coverage any more than they
should be allowed to use their religious beliefs to pay them less than
men. Religious liberty is a fundamental value in our country, but
religion cannot be used to discriminate against others.

Most laws written by men "to protect women" actually tend to do the
opposite which is oppress and harm them. Think the laws barring certain
foelds of employment, restrictions on abortion or birth control. This
is especially true when men claim a magic invisible imaginary sky daddy
tells them to do this to protect women.The same can be said of men dictating the proper role or behavior for women.From The Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-supreme-court-abortion-20160207-story.htmlRobert BarnesFeb. 10, 2016History holds a lesson for the Supreme Court, the brief warns: Be skeptical of laws protecting women that are written by men.

The
nation's past is littered with such statutes, say the historians who
filed the friend-of-the-court brief, and the motives were suspect.

Some
protected women from "the embarrassment of hearing filthy evidence" as
members of a jury, a sheltering instinct that resulted in female
defendants being judged by panels composed only of men.

Some shielded women from having to work nights as pharmacists in hospitals - but not as low-wage custodians.

Some barred women from working as bartenders - jobs coveted by men - but not as cocktail waitresses.

The
brief is filed by professors from across the country in the court's
upcoming abortion case, Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt. The brief
urges the justices to examine the intent of Texas legislators who say
they approved new restrictions on abortion providers as health
safeguards for the women undergoing the procedure.

"Any new law
that claims to protect women's health and safety should be scrutinized
carefully to assess whether its ostensibly protective function actually
serves to deny liberty and equal citizenship to women," said the brief
filed by 16 historians, 13 of whom are women.

It is part of an
avalanche of amicus briefs filed by both sides in the case, which will
be the court's most important look at abortion rights in decades.

And
the attempt at persuasion, like many of the others, is representative
of a specialized brand of legal brief that aims to school the court not
about law but about life.

"Brandeis briefs" are long on history
and science and short on detailed legal citations. The first of its kind
was filed in 1908 by lawyer Louis D. Brandeis, who eight years later
became famous as the first Jewish Supreme Court justice.

Last month, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
discussed the importance of the revolutionary brief at - where else? -
Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., at a ceremony marking the
centennial of his Supreme Court appointment.

Brandeis's submission
"was unlike any the court had yet seen. It was to be loaded with facts
and spare on formal legal argument," Ginsburg said. The facts consumed
98 of the brief's 113 pages.

"The aim of the Brandeis brief was to
educate the judiciary about the real world in which the laws under
inspection operated," Ginsburg said.

Not
only are hurricanes, disease and mosquitoes natural, the way the word
is defined by regulators can render it practically meaningless

I’ve
repeatedly come across the idea that natural means good among
eco-friendly folks like myself. It has emerged in online forums,
conversations with friends, and discussions at health food stores. It
has also popped up regularly in the comments section of this column,
where astute readers can often be found cautioning against making this
assumption.

I happen to agree with them: the assumption that
natural equals good is wrong. But it’s understandable that people would
feel that way, isn’t it? Natural just sounds good; easy. Natural sounds
like puppies and sunshine and fresh air. Natural! The way nature
intended! Before meddlesome mankind stuck our big noses in and ruined
everything, that is.

The problem is twofold. First: “natural”
doesn’t mean good – not entirely and not always. Second: “natural”
sometimes doesn’t mean anything at all, at least not in the way it’s
most commonly used – to imbue a product with a vaguely positive
attribute in the hopes that consumers will buy it.Beginning with the first point, as we learned from vaginal detox pearls,
natural does not necessarily equate to beneficial, effective or even
safe. In fact, here are some natural things which are also actually
quite terrible: death, disease, beets, cute little zebra babies being
eaten by lions, poisonous plants, mosquitoes, hurricanes.

All of
these things fit the dictionary definition of the word natural
(“existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind”) yet
none of them are really all that appealing as they relate to humankind.
Beets stain everything and taste like dirt; sunburns ruin vacations;
the seeds of the castor oil plant have the distinction of being the
Guinness Book of World Records holder for world’s most poisonous plant,
yet its charming purple flowers litter gardens around the world.

It
is therefore not enough to see “natural” and read “good for me” in its
place. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of natural treatments and beauty
remedies and homemade cleaning products, but in order for them to be
useful, they have to do more than simply have “natural” as their main
attribute. There’s no sense in having a natural cleaner that doesn’t
clean, or a natural remedy that only makes you sicker. In these cases,
natural isn’t doing you any favours.

The reverse isn’t necessarily
true either. I’m reminded of this daily: without the dose of 11
decidedly unnatural pills I take twice a day, my chronic kidney
condition would make it impossible for me to write this column. My
daughter was born when surgeons strapped me to a table, cut an incision
into my lower abdomen and then reached in and pulled her out – it really
doesn’t get much more unnatural than that. But if it had been left up
to nature, my full placenta previa would have meant that one of us would
have died during labour.

So, on to point two. In the US, at the
time of this writing, the US Department of Agriculture does not restrict
the use of the word “natural” to describe food or beverage products
unless there are added colours, synthetic substances, or flavours.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

From Israel National News: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/18592#.VvRoVLXlqUn

Europe's actions, now and in the past, have led to the reaping of a horrible harvest.

Phyllis CheslerTuesday, March 22, 2016

In
2004 and 2005 Islamic terrorists blew up the Madrid train and London
subway; 243 civilians were murdered and 2,750 were wounded.

Neither
attack stopped the flow of Muslim immigrants nor staunched the
politically correct thinking of European leaders about Islam.

In
2012, a terrorist shot and blew up seven people and wounded 125
civilians on the street of Liege, Belgium. That same year, in Burgess,
Bulgaria, an Islamic terrorist blew up six civilians on a bus and
wounded thirty more. The bus was transporting 42 Israeli tourists.

These
murderous attacks did not change the immigration policies of Europe,
which did not close its national borders or the borders of the EU.
Anyone who arrived in Europe could still travel to any other European
destination.

In early 2015, Islamic terrorists shot down and
murdered 20 civilians and wounded 22 more in the infamous attack on the
Charlie Hebdo offices and the kosher deli. Later that same year, Islamic
terrorists murdered 130 civilians and wounded 368 more in Paris.

World
leaders marched and sent condolences, but the European Union did not
change its policies. It did not clean up its “no go” zones which police
fear to enter, where terrorists hide out as they plan their attacks, and
where Sharia law prevails, not European civil law.

In 2016, women
were sexually assaulted by gangs of Muslim men in many cities in
Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. In Cologne alone, over 1,000 women
were terrorized, corralled, robbed, groped, and penetrated.

Now, three
months later, and despite police vigilance and an ongoing manhunt,
Islamic terrorists blew up 34 civilians and wounded 83 more in Brussels,
Belgium.

Of course, European Jews have been attacked as Jews everywhere
in Europe during the 21st century. They have been bullied, beaten,
stabbed, shot, kidnapped, tortured (remember Ilan Halimi z”l in Paris?)
and blown up, mainly by Muslims.

It is all quite awful. What is going on? Here’s but one idea.

Historically,
Europeans mobs and European leaders either led or were passively
complicit in the systematic and perpetual pogroms of Jews and thereafter
in the Nazi murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

A Rutgers professor uses new anti-Semitism in an old blood libel, this one about Arab terrorist organs.

A
Rutgers University associate professor of women’s and gender studies
claims Israel is stealing organs from the bodies of Arab terrorists —
and she’s threatening to sue anyone who publishes a recording of the
lecture at Vassar College in which she made the claim.

Professor
Jasbir Puar’s February 3 lecture “was taped without my permission or
that of the people who had invited me,” she said. Nevertheless, she
slammed a “current Zionist strategy” of what she called “silencing and
intimidation tactics” aimed at stifling the “exercise of free speech and
academic freedom.”

Moreover, Puar recently canceled a scheduled
lecture at Fordham University on the “biopolitics of debility in Gaza” –
because the administration insisted on recording the talk and making it
publicly available, according to The Tower.

For some odd
reason she appears unwilling to see that her unwillingness to share her
words with the rest of the world is if anything, a much greater
self-censorship – one that raises deep suspicions about the legality of
what she said.

In a column written in Jadaliyya,
(produced by the Arab Studies Institute, ASI) Puar writes about her
Feb. 3 lecture, which she said was delivered to a “welcoming and
enthusiastic audience.” ASI has received funding from the Social Science
Research Council, and the Open Society Institute, supported by George
Soros.

The Jadaliyya publication combines local
knowledge, scholarship and advocacy aimed at audiences primarily in the
United States and the Middle East. The site currently publishes posts
both in Arabic, French, English, and Turkish.

“The fraught history
of organ mining practices from both IDF soldiers and Palestinian bodies
during the 1990s is well documented. During the second intifada,
Palestinian bodies were held at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic
Medicine for prolonged periods without explanation. Even mainstream
Israeli press such as Ha’aretz have reported on the collecting of
illegally obtained organs at Abu Kabir,” Puar wrote.

“In my
lecture, I made clear that I was not making any empirical claims about
current organ mining. Rather, I was conveying a small part of the sheer
terror of life in the West Bank since the uprising began in October
2015. I can only surmise that the charges of anti-Semitism and blood
libel leveled against me were intended to discredit scholarship about
the deleterious effects of the occupation on Palestinian daily life.

Explicit
sexism against the democratic frontrunner might be unacceptable, but
subtler forms of prejudice are everywhere – and women have had enough

As Hillary Clinton was giving her victory speech after Tuesday night’s primaries, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tweeted out two sentences that nearly every American woman has heard some version of at one point in her life:

Smile. You just had a big night.

Women
on the internet were, to put it lightly, not amused. Many took
Scarborough on immediately; even Full Frontal host Samantha Bee
responded by replying with a picture of her not-so-smiling face.This meme-able moment is part of a broader trend this election season: as the explicit sexism we saw during Clinton’s 2008 run
has mostly been quelled or deemed unacceptable, women are pushing back
against less easy-to-name offenses. And the visceral response against
Scarborough demonstrates just how tired women are of having to explain
how sexism operates over and over again.

Of all the things women
hear from men – whether street harassers or pundits – there is special
disdain for “smile” because of its particular condescension, and the
tired trope that women should be forever chipper even as they’re walking
down the street or, you know, running for president of the United
States. In fact, men telling women to smile is such a universally hated
prompt that there are feminist art projects dedicated to it, Buzzfeed lists that outline imagined responses (“just fart instead”), and a popular Broad City gif of the lead characters responding to a stranger’s insistence that they put on a happy face.

But
it hasn’t been just Scarborough’s poorly thought-out tweet that women
have found familiar. There are certain phrases, sentiments and actions
that might not seem gendered upon first glance but are so typical to
women’s everyday experience of sexism that they rub a lot of us the
wrong way.

The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing
before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for
Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest
five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years
earlier. Hansen said, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that
the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Fast forward 28 years and, while we’re hardly out of the Waffle House yet, we know much more aboutclimate change science. Hansen is still worried that the rest of us aren’t worried enough.

Last
summer, prior to countries’ United Nations negotiations in Paris,
Hansen and 16 collaborators authored a draft paper that suggested we
could see at least 10 feet of sea-level rise in as few as 50 years. If
that sounds alarming to you, it is
— 10 feet of sea-level rise is more than enough to effectively kick us
out of even the most well-endowed coastal cities. Stitching together
archaeological evidence of past climate change, current observations,
and future-telling climate models, the authors suggested that even a
small amount of global warming can rack up enormous consequences — and
quickly.

However the paper, publicized before it had been
through peer review, elicited a mix of shock and skepticism, with some
journalists calling the news a “bombshell” but a number of scientists urging deeper consideration.

Now, the final version of the paper
has been published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and
Physics. It’s been reviewed and lightly edited, but its conclusions are
still shocking — and still contentious.

So what’s the deal? The
authors highlight several of threats they believe we’ll face this
century, including many feet of sea-level rise, a halting of major ocean
circulatory currents, and an outbreak of super storms. These are the
big threats we’ve been afraid of — and Hansen et al. say they
could be here before we know it — well before the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s sanctioned climate models predict.

The
anti-Semitic Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel
keeps reaching for—and finding—new depths of indecency. Among the
deepest descenders into this abyss is Jasbir Puar, an associate
professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. Professor Puar
recently garnered national attention for her address at Vassar, February
3, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.”
The talk has not been published, but some in the audience reported that
Puar exhorted armed resistance to Israel; alleged that Israel “mined
for organs” from dead Palestinians; and claimed that Israel
systematically starves Palestinians as part of a medical experiment.

Readers can get a good idea of what Puar had to say from her November 2015 essay, published in Borderlands,
“The ‘Right’ to Maim: Disablement and Inhumanist Biopolitics in
Palestine.” The “right to maim,” to be clear, does not refer to the
epidemic of stabbings of Israelis by Palestinians. It refers to an
“implicit claim” by Israel “to the right to maim and debilitate
Palestinian bodies and environments as a form of biopolitical control.”

The
talk provoked heated responses, both to its substance and to the eight
Vassar academic departments (including Jewish Studies) that sponsored
it. But it also introduced a new angle in the current controversies over
free expression on campus. The Vassar professor who introduced
Puar asked the audience to “refrain from recording this evening’s
proceedings, in the spirit of congeniality and mutual respect, though it
is not against the law.” This request was also made as part of “the
modest contract of trust essential to the exchange of ideas.”

As
Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson observed, “Requesting
non-recording of an open, public event on the pretext that non-recording
is ‘essential to the exchange of ideas’ is odd.”Puar’s talk
leapt to national attention when Mark Yudof, former president of the
University of California, and Ken Waltzer, an emeritus professor of
history from Michigan State, published an op-ed, “Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar,” in the Wall Street Journal.
Puar objected that Yudof and Waltzer quoted her out of context. If they
erred, it would be easy enough for Puar to set the record straight by
releasing the transcript. Instead, she has protested her right to give
public lectures that are off the record.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Jew hating lately seems to have become a litmus test as to whether or
not one can consider themselves either left or progressive. Seems that
because I support both Israel and an individuals right to keep and bear
arms for the purposes of self defense while loathing the present day so
called Left's drum beat of attacks upon Free Speech I have, in my old
age become a former leftie.

Fortunately for me I have grown weary
of politics and have come to view both the left and the right as a bunch
of pompous, full of shit trip pushers. As a result I don't give a shit
as to what either group of extreme lunatics has to say.

My
politics can be summed up by the phrase, "Leave me the fuck alone." It
has all become a game of self promotion and gathering a fan base of
sycophants who adore you and lavish praise upon you for your extreme
positions.

Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters

As
the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and
tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a
rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two
activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry
into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned
saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is
hatred of Jews.

I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left
dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just
a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents
aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to
Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.

Start
with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby
certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle
with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God”
and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.

It’d
be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex
Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded
that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one
club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish
student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this
week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there
is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of
this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were
succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.

But this is the
brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are
complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel.
Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own
unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as
anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in
raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.

You
can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means
all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting
propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit
targets were Jews.

What of those who attack not Jews, but only
Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one
wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish
Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.

But
Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that
historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a
codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at
the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating
behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli
government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then
use those terms: they carry much less baggage.

by Melanie NathanFeb. 26, 2016On
a Friday afternoon, in February 1969, as Jewish Sabbath shoppers filled
local markets and stores, terrorists planted a bomb in a crowded
grocery store in downtown Jerusalem. The bombing sought to take more
lives than it did. While many were spared, 2 people died and 8 were
wounded. The terrorists were caught, convicted and sentenced to life
in prison. Who would have thought that 47 years later, this saga would
replay in an America courtroom. And who thought that the convicted
terrorist mastermind would become the victim and the victims would be
forgotten!

This convicted terrorist served only 10 years of her
life sentence in Israel due to a prisoner swap, and is now fighting her
immigration fraud conviction to become a U.S. citizen. If she succeeds
she will enjoy the privileges, rights and all America has to offer a
free person. Rasmea Odeh, (Rasmeah, Rasmieh) seeking citizenship in the
U.S.A., was convicted of lying on her immigration forms, and a movement
of anti-Israel BDS supporters have enveloped her, attempting to turn
the terrorist into a revered victim, for their cause, with
unconscionable insult to the memory of those who were robbed of their
lives, and at great expense to the families who mourn their deaths, all
these years later.

How anyone can support U.S. citizenship for a
person convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the bombing
murders of fellow human beings, escapes me. How anyone can participate
in the dirty trick of converting a terrorist into a victim, escapes me.
Yet Rasmieh Odeh, has become a poster victim for the BDS movement and
anti-Israel activism here in the U.S.A.

Yesterday a panel of judges on a U.S. federal appeals court, sent back to the U.S. District court, the case of Rasmieh Odeh, found guilty of lying on immigration forms , about her alleged role in bombings in Israel in 1969 that killed two civilians.

Bogus new linkages blame Jewish state for basically everything

Have
you heard of “intersectionality,” the latest strategy of Israel-haters
who, like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s classic, reside in a “looking-glass
world,” where clocks run backwards, language is nonsensical and
everything is topsy-turvy?

Have you wondered why Black Lives
Matter activists carry signs “Justice From Ferguson to Palestine,”
seeking to link claims of American racism and police violence with
claims of Israeli brutality against Palestinians?

How about the
National Women’s Studies Association endorsing a boycott of Israel to
condemn the “sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated [by Israel]
against Palestinians,”
making a fictitious claim about the only Middle Eastern country with
full gender equality and ignoring repression of women’s rights in
Palestinian society?

Jewish Voice for Peace, a rabidly anti-Israel
organization, links the Palestinian issue to “the struggles of students
of color, student survivors of sexual assault, and all others who on
campus fight against oppression, whether imperialism, racism,
patriarchy, police violence, or other systemic inequities.”At Columbia University, Students for Justice in Palestine and No Red Tape, a student group fighting sexual violence, join forces. What does opposing sexual violence have to do with Israel and the Palestinians?

At
Vassar, Africana Studies offers course AFRS 383, “Transnational
Solidarities: Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination/Black Struggle
for Liberation”
and Jasbir Puar, a Rutgers Gender/Queer Studies professor, delivers a
diatribe accusing Israel of harvesting Palestinian organs for research,
experimenting on Palestinian children and targeting Palestinians for
“stunting” and “maiming.”Welcome to the world of “intersectionality,” inhabited by Israel-haters on college campuses and elsewhere.

Proponents
of intersectionality see a world of all-encompassing oppression, where
racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and ableism constitute an
intersecting system. All injustices are interconnected, even if
occurring in unconnected geographic, cultural and political
environments. This is the rationalization for building alliances among
unrelated causes like LGBTQ rights, fossil fuel divestment, prison
reform, racial discrimination and immigration.

Decades ago, UCLA law professor, Kimberle Crenshaw,
described intersectional theory to relate identity and power for black
women. Her ideas have been vastly expanded to other so-called
marginalized, victimized groups. Uniting “oppressed” groups, the theory
goes, strengthens them against the dominant white power structure.

The
anti-Israel BDS campaigns have successfully injected the Palestinians
into this intersectional mix as victims of colonialist oppression by
pro-Western Israel. The marriage of intersectionality with the
Arab-Israeli conflict allows any victim group to make common cause with
the Palestinians. The Palestinian struggle is linked to other “social
justice” causes, no matter how disparate, in an aggressive strategy to
attract supporters and speak with one unified voice.

Notorious Israel-bashers such as Rashid
Khalidi (Columbia University), Joel Beinin (Stanford University), and
Steven Salaita (American University of Beirut) are among the signatories
to an open letter to
Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill defending Puar against an
alleged campaign of “vilification and hatred” following her inflammatory
lecture. Unlike the vast majority of academic jargon-filled apologias
for bigotry that populate the lecture circuit, Puar’s talk was widely covered and rightly condemned by a disgusted public.

In
evoking “hate mail and other threats” against Puar, the authors allude
to the specter of death threats — whether real or imagined — a
time-honored tradition among academics unaccustomed to the twin horrors of criticism and accountability.

The letter inveighs against the particular evils of a February 17 Wall Street Journalop-ed by
Mark G. Yudof, former University of California president, and Ken
Waltzer, professor emeritus of history at Michigan State University,
titled, “Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar.” Yudof and Waltzer had the
temerity to point out the obvious: by accusing Israel of extracting
organs from Palestinians for medical research, Puar was “updating the
medieval blood libel against Jews.”

In the face of such censure,
and unable to silence Puar’s critics, the letter’s authors urge
President Hill to take the drastic action of writing “a letter to the Wall Street Journal . . . condemning in no uncertain terms the unjustifiable attack on Vassar and on Professor Puar.” Take that, free speech!With
Puar’s case as the catalyst, the open letter goes on to bemoan the
supposed “suppression of speech or academic freedom related to
Palestinian rights or Israeli policies” on “college and university
campuses.” Predictably, it blames the “millions of dollars in donations”
from “political pressure groups” and “right-wing, hawkish Israel
advocates such as the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and media owner Haim
Saban” — otherwise known in conspiratorial circles as the Israel Lobby.
Of the destructive impact of the millions of dollars flowing into
academe from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and other despotic Muslim nations, it authors are conveniently silent.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

'We can't demand equality on one hand but say we should be excused from the draft solely because of our gender on the other'

The
debate about whether women should be required to register for Selective
Service and the misguided commentary surrounding it has made one thing
clear: Many senior leaders are out of touch with the attitudes of
younger Americans. I think this younger generation believes that
changing the current system is a natural step toward the elimination of
gender discrimination in the military and the establishment of a level
playing field for citizenship in America.

The
proponents of keeping women in traditional roles assume that requiring
us to register for the draft will create such a hue and cry from the
public that it will cause officials to reconsider the wisdom of allowing
women to serve in combat.

But such comments are highly emotional at best, and at worst, they demonstrate the same benevolent sexist tendencies that have prevented American women from having equal job opportunities and equal pay for decades.

Many
men (and women) of a certain era believe that women need to be
protected by men because we are not emotionally or physically capable of
looking after ourselves. But such individuals fail to comprehend that,
in seeking to shelter women from the evils of the world, they deny women
the opportunity to succeed in every aspect of society. They also fail
to consider that, since the Revolutionary War, women have served in
combat “under the radar” and that we possess more ability to
successfully wage battle than we are routinely given credit for.

Of
all of the services, the Marine Corps has been the most pedantic when
it comes to diversity and cultural evolution. From racial desegregation
to the abolition of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and now the integration of
women into ground combat jobs, the service has historically been the
slowest to embrace change.

Over
the past 12 months, the online commentary from current and former
Marines has revealed significant fault lines in how male Marines
perceive and treat female Marines. While I was the commanding officer of
the only all-female unit in the Marine Corps, I experienced incredible
pushback from my superiors when it came to trying to improve the
performance of my recruits and Marines. I felt my superiors were quick
to apply much harsher evaluative leadership criteria to me than to my
male counterparts. Their characterization of me
as an abusive leader was a clear example of the damned if you do,
damned if you don’t scenarios women experience every day in both the
military and civilian sectors. (I was fired after being characterized as “mean” by Marines I was simply holding accountable—an expectation for any leader in the Corps.)

LONDON
— Last month, a co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex
Chalmers, quit in protest at what he described as rampant anti-Semitism
among members. A “large proportion” of the club “and the student left in
Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,” he said in a statement.

Chalmers
referred to members of the executive committee “throwing around the
term ‘Zio’” — an insult used by the Ku Klux Klan; high-level expressions
of “solidarity with Hamas” and explicit defense of “their tactics of
indiscriminately murdering civilians”; and the dismissal of any concern
about anti-Semitism as “just the Zionists crying wolf.”

Noa Lessof-Gendler, a student at Cambridge University, complained last month in Varsity,
a campus newspaper, that anti-Semitism was felt “in the word ‘Zio’”
flung around in left-wing groups.” She wrote, “I’m Jewish, but that
doesn’t mean I have Palestinian blood on my hands,” or should feel nervous “about conversations in Hall when an Israeli speaker visits.”

The
rise of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain’s
opposition Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for whom
support of the Palestinians is uncritical and for whom, in the words of Alan Johnson, a British political theorist, “that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is.”

People
who refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton on principle may be able to ride
out the storm of a Republican administration. Many of us can’t

As it becomes ever more likely that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, a host of people haveannouncedthattheyeitherwon’tvotefor Clinton, or won’tvoteat
all, if Bernie Sanders isn’t the candidate on the ballot. I believe
there’s a self-righteousness about this that only people with a certain
level of privilege can afford to have.

If Donald Trump wins the presidency over Hillary Clinton,
it’s not the fault of people like me who won’t vote for Republicans.
It’s the fault of the Democratic Party for nominating a Republican.

There’s
a long list of policies that Belville and others argue keeps Clinton in
step with Republicans. But anyone actually paying attention to the
Democratic primary debates of this election season will have noticed
that Clinton and Sanders agree
on more issues than they disagree on, and that both their platforms are
polar opposites to those the GOP candidates are promoting. Sanders has
even pushed Clinton to the left on certain issues.

But like the
people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 in protest at Al Gore,
Bernie-or-nobody voters are making a decision with implications that go
far beyond their narrow frame of reference. To use Belville as
sacrificial lamb, again:

We
survived eight years of George W Bush, and though it did us a lot of
harm and killed thousands of us, he didn’t appoint himself dictator and
abolish the supreme court or anything crazy. Democracy continued.

Actually,
had George W Bush never been elected, thousands of Americans would have
never died in the Iraq war, not to mention many thousands more Iraqis.
Then there is the matter of Hurricane Katrina, in which a natural
disaster turned into a man-made catastrophe due to the incompetence of
the Bush administration and their total lack of regard for the lives of
poor black people in New Orleans.

Yes, affluent, mostly white
progressives survived the last Republican regime, but those who
literally cannot afford to act as piously as y’all suffered. I have
critiqued the Obama administration, but to act as though he has not been
an agent of change – and that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t do more good
than Donald Trump – is to dance with delusion. Had many of these voters
supported the Democrats in the non-presidential election years, Obama would’ve been able to promote an even more progressive agenda.

People
who refuse to vote for a less-favored Democrat on principle are just
punishing a second constituency unlikely to vote: those who know very
little about the power they yield because they are so marginalized they
feel their say doesn’t matter.

A
few degrees warmer since preindustrial averages may not seem like much,
but in the grand scheme of things, it matters. Countries around the
world formally agreed years ago to hold warming under the 2-degree mark,
and the respected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned of the dangerous impacts of 2 degrees of global warming.

The news comes in the wake of a parade of record-shattering temperatures. Last year was the hottest on record for the globe, and last month is looking pretty warm, too:

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson